Benefits of Cloud Encryption

Allie Hawkins2019-05-03

These days a lot of people are moving their data to one or another cloud storage. It is understandable, keeping your data online offers numerous advantages – it becomes available to you anywhere, anytime, from any device, it is easier to collaborate on documents and you get to save space on your hard drive. However a few of us are still holding back from subscribing to such services, mainly because of concerns related to cloud data security. Is it really safe to keep your data out there? How much trust can you place in a third party to protect your confidential documents? Such cloud security concerns are justified – now and then we get to hear of data leakage or a hacker attack, etc.

Cloud providers are aware of them too, and they put in a lot of effort to keep your data protected. One of the techniques they use is cloud data encryption, i.e. a service of encrypting your data before placing it on a cloud. It is usually no different from in-house encryption, although in most cases it is pretty basic – data encryption, i.e. turning your data into ciphertext means more processor overhead. So it is always better to make sure that the encryption security in the cloud is matching the level of your data sensitivity.

Some cloud service providers offer cheaper alternatives to encryption. One of them is redacting data, i.e. removing or blacking out sensitive information, e-mail IDs, for example, from a document. Another option is so-called obfuscation – making something difficult to understand. This “something” could be a programming code or any other data that needs to remain confidential.

Secure cloud storage with CloudMounter

Due to storage security concerns not only service providers but also apps you use for accessing data online employ various cloud protection techniques. Thus Eltima Software has already added encryption to their CloudMounter. This utility, as its name suggests, enables mounting cloud storage accounts on Mac so you can access their contents as if it were available locally. Unlike native apps of these cloud storages, CloudMounter does not force you to duplicate data on the cloud and on the local machine, the data gets copied to your hard drive only when you choose to open it. The app supports all popular cloud storage services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon S3, WebDAV, and it also allows you to connect to remote servers via FTP/ FTPS/ SFTP and WebDAV protocols. CloudMounter is your single point of access to all these services, and adding secure cloud encryption certainly adds value to its functionality.